Forward Momentum

After a lot of thought and mental sketching I finally sat down yesterday and wrote a handful of pages on my Smitten script. I already had a couple on the go, but I went in, reworked what I had and continued on for another five pages or so taking the story to it's first real change of locations.

It was a pretty good feeling being able to fire those pages off like I did after...well, 2 years of thinking about them, I guess. Granted, it's not like I spent two whole years working out the dtails of the storyline or developing characters, but it was an off and on sort of process that occured over that period of time, so I'm counting the whole thing. The idea itself is even older than that, but who's counting.

Anyway, as I was saying, it felt good to finally get some of those scenes out of my head and on to the page. I doubt that what I have will stay exactly as it is now (heck, a week ago the whole set-up of these pages was completely different so I have no allusions about the dialogue changing over time) but as long as I keep the forward momentum going and I get to the end, I'll have a complete first draft to deal with and I can shape and mold it as I please at that point. Also, if I do manage to find an artist who was willing to turn it into a comic book with me, than I'm sure he or she will have some input as to how the story unfolds and some of the details will change accordingly.

As I said before, the story was originally meant to be a screenplay but I decided to change it to a comic book script after I realised that I would never be able to produce this as a film on my own. Finding an artist and collaborating on a three or four issue mini-series sounds a lot more doable from where I'm standing, although I'm not exactly sure where I would start to find an artist, never mind one who was interested in a small romantic comedy. Ah well, finish the script and then worry about the artist, I suppose. First things first, right?

My wife was able to offer some encouragement in the form of some positive criticism. Being my first real foray into an original fictional story, I gave her the pages I had to read over and give some opinions on. Being my second harshest critic, I figured that she would be able to set me on the right track, not to mention the fact that she helped me break the story in the first place so she should know if I was screwing up the idea. Her response, as I said, was a positive one. She was happy with how the intro came out and liked the dialogue citing it as fairly natural, which is good. At this stage she feels that I fit into the better-than-average category, so that's fairly encouraging to hear. As long as she wasn't just trying to be a cheerleader for the project, which I doubt.

Among other reasons, I'm actually writing this post as a way of avoiding tackling the next scene which introduces the rest of the protagonist's group of frineds as well as bringing the boy-meets-girl aspect of the story into the mix. Considering the nature of the story, she really has to click with the audience right off the bat in order to sell the idea and I'm nervous about being able to get that just right. I have some ideas about how I might achieve that but I've yet to settle on something as of yet, so I should probably go work that out now.

Later!

mike